You may have heard the old chestnut about the atheist who suddenly saw a grizzly bear charging towards him while walking in the woods. The man ran as fast as he could, but the bear began to overtake him. Then the fellow tripped. The bear was right on top of him.
The atheist cried out: “Oh my God!”
The bear froze. And a bright light shone from the sky and a voice said:
“You denied my existence for so many years. What do you expect of me?”
The atheist looked into the light and said: “It would be hypocritical to ask you to treat me as a believer, but perhaps you could make the BEAR a believer?”
“Very well,” said the voice. And then suddenly the bear brought both paws together, bowed his head and said: “Lord, bless this food, which I am about to receive... Amen.” The moral of the story: be careful what you ask for!
Today we celebrate the Feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, in Latin “Corpus Christi,” and in Greek, “eucharistia” or thanksgiving. I invite all of us to reflect upon the significance of this feast.
To begin with, there have been many impressive meals in the course of human history. Some intimate, some grand.
There was the first supper, so the Book of Genesis says, where the entre was forbidden fruit. That meal turned into a catastrophe.
There are state banquets, like the one this month at Buckingham Palace, where heads of state toast guests. It took royal staff three days to set that table.
And there’s the Passover meal, the Seder, in remembrance of the Jews’ deliverance from their oppressors in ancient Egypt.
Now the meal table is often the center of family life. Memorable things often take place around meal tables. Families celebrate important transitions in life—birthdays, marriages, graduations, retirements—as they gather around a table.
And in our global Christian family, the altar or table of the Lord is the center of our faith community. Think about that.
We gather around this table to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, to re-enact the mystery of the dying and rising of Jesus Christ so that we can re-experience our salvation, the gift of God's life in us and nurture that life.
Now consider what the word of God has to say to us today. The word in the Book of Genesis takes us back almost four thousand years to a mysterious kingly figure, Melchizedek. He blesses Abram for winning a decisive battle. They celebrate with bread and wine. This story, for many, prefigures the Lord’s Supper.
St. Paul, in his letter to the Christian community at Corinth in Greece, highlights the sacredness of the Lord’s Supper. Paul saw that these gatherings was getting out of hand. Some Corinthians were drunk; others weren’t sharing the food and drink they brought. So Paul reminds them: This sacrificial meal reenacts the life-giving death/resurrection of Jesus, the new and everlasting covenant God made with us. It is, Paul emphasizes, a truly sacred experience that should be celebrated reverently.
This Lord’s Supper soon developed into the structure we know today: the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Herein, we worship and praise God for who he is and what he has done for us.
In the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus satisfies the hungry crowd in the so-called miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish. People today as then have so many hungers. Some hunger for bread; others for justice and freedom; and still others for peace. Jesus here satisfies the crowd’s physical hunger, but this wonder prefigures the liturgy of the Eucharist where the bread and wine become the body and blood of the living Christ, gloriously alive, satisfying our spiritual hunger.
To understand the Eucharist, we have to focus on three phrases of Jesus at his last supper. Jesus said: This is my body…this is my blood. The bread and wine become sacramentally the Living Christ, his real presence among us until He comes in glory at the end-time.
The second phrase: Do this in remembrance of me. The same victim who died once for us outside the walls of Jerusalem centuries ago at Calvary returns sacramentally to this sacrificial meal today and every day. And that's why we celebrate mass: so that we can re-experience our salvation.
The third phrase: Take and eat…take and drink. Jesus invites us to become one with himself ever so briefly in communion.
And what is the purpose of the bread we eat? The blood we drink? To form us into a vibrant faith community. Paul wrote: because the bread is one, we, though many, are one body.
This bread we eat and this blood we drink not only forms us into a more vibrant faith community but also empowers us to reach out compassionately (with our time and talent especially) to one another, especially to those immediately around us.
Some of you may know the story about Giacomo Puccini who wrote such operas as La Boheme, Madame Butterfly, Tosca, and Turandot. Puccini discovered he had cancer while writing Turandot. He began a race against death to complete this opera. But Puccini died in 1924 before he finished.
For the world premiere of Turandot at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, his friend Arturo Toscanini conducted magnificently all the way up to where maestro Puccini had left off. And then Toscanini stopped and cried out: thus far the master wrote.
But then the opera continued to its finale, to thunderous applause. The point of the story is: where Puccini left off, others picked up the torch.
And where Jesus left off his earthly ministry, He asks us to continue that ministry until He comes again in glory at the end time. Yes, Jesus has no hands but our hands to do His work today; He has no feet but our feet to lead human beings to Him, who is our way and our truth and our life; and He has no voice but ours to tell others the good news, that Jesus Christ is gloriously alive. And because He lives, we live.
Yes, the Eucharist unites us as the mystical body of Christ and empowers us to be the hands and feet and voice of Jesus Christ in our homes and workplaces and communities, until He comes again in glory at the end time to transform this universe of ours into a new heaven and a new earth. Amen.
